The Salt Maiden (Leisure Romantic Suspense)

by Colleen Thompson

  More likely she was just another hallucination, a parting gift from the DTs—as if the puking and the shaking haven’t been enough. But I can tell you this much: before I saw her I was hell-bent on jumping in the beater and hauling ass to Pecos for a bottle. Afterward the craving lifted, and I stood staring in the direction of the salt domes as the rarest peace rained down from the night sky.

  —Entry four, March 2

  Angie’s sobriety journal

  Saturday, June 30, 6:36 P.M.

  101 Degrees Fahrenheit

  The vehicle’s progress could be seen for miles as it churned up dust that stood out against the stark blue like a signal fire’s smoke plume. The Hunter lowered the binoculars and wiped sweat off the eyepieces with a shirtsleeve.

  Foolish woman had come back to the desert. Not only to the desert, but to the perfect isolation of the dilapidated ranch house out near Lost Lake. She should have gone back to her fancy family to reclaim her fancy life. Should have taken the fluke that had saved her and run with it like a jackrabbit.

  She’d been given a sporting chance the first time. An opportunity to learn from her mistakes and mend her ways.

  But the Hunter did not believe in second chances, not with so very much at stake. Besides that, natural selection was less forgiving in Rimrock County than most places, and if there was one thing to be respected, it was the ancient order of this most ancient land.

  “Out here it’s survival of the fittest,” came the parched whisper, a rasping hiss barely tempered by a swig from the canteen. “And you’ve already proven, by returning, that the fittest isn’t you.”

  Jay had just stopped by his office when the phone on his desk started ringing. With a sigh he reached for the receiver, though he’d been on his way home from another long day spent rechecking quadrants where others had supposedly looked for Angie Vanover. As much as Jay wanted to believe in both his deputy and his volunteers, he wasn’t taking any chances, especially after this morning’s phone conversation with Special Agent Tomlin from the FBI. Just thinking of it tempted him to pin his star to the corkboard and skip town before the proverbial shit hit the fan.

  “Dennis Riggins,” the caller identified himself so loudly Jay moved the receiver six inches from his ear. Though he couldn’t be much older than his early fifties, the county commissioner was just about deaf. Too proud to wear a hearing aid, he compensated by speaking at top volume.

  “What’s on your mind?” Jay bellowed back into the phone. Anything less and Dennis would simply shout back demands that he quit mumbling.

  “Saw somethin’ you might want to check out today. I was passin’ by the old Webb place…” Named for the original rancher who had abandoned it decades earlier, the adobe had attracted any number of squatters over the years—including, most recently, the artist calling herself Angelina Morningstar. “I spotted this big, new-lookin’ Expedition parked there. Drove close enough to see it was a rental, but—”

  “Did you see any people?” Jay asked, at the same time praying, Please let it be Angie and whatever boyfriend she’s been off with. His mind conjured an image of himself driving her right up to the doorstep of Dana Vanover’s place, which, in his mind, was an immense, white-columned mansion. She’d come out on her crutches, then throw her arms around his neck and kiss him before tearfully reuniting with her wayward sister.

  Pleasant as it was to imagine himself as Dana’s—or anybody’s—hero, it didn’t hold a candle to the dreams that had left him hard and hurting every night since meeting her.

  “Didn’t spot a soul,” said Dennis. “You think that Vanover woman could be back with them protestors—or maybe some reporter?”

  Dennis’s nervousness came through as loud and clear as his words. A rancher who derived most of his income from oil royalties off his land, he had put a lot of his personal money into Haz-Vestment as a show of faith in its plans. Jay felt sick to think of telling him the FBI’s suspicions. He’d been asked to keep the information to himself, since the principals had not yet been arrested. And, of course, the suspects remained innocent until proven guilty.

  Bullshit. You know damned well that salt-dome project isn’t happening—and that Devil’s Claw has seen the last of Miriam Piper-Gold and her slick cronies. Pied Piper-Gold is what they ought to call that woman.

  He said, “If it is Angie over there, you don’t have to worry. I promised I’d haul her troublemaking ass straight back to Houston, and I meant it. But what were you doing over by the Webb place?”

  The abandoned ranch, near the dry salt flat called Lost Lake, was at least an hour away.

  “Well, I…” Dennis started. “I was headin’ over to see if anybody’s been out to the salt domes. Equipment was supposed to start arrivin’ last week, but the gate across the access road’s still locked.”

  Jay’s conscience gave him a swift kick. He owed the family friend who had helped get him this job when he’d been running out of options. He’d confessed to Dennis about the bridge in Baghdad and how it haunted him, even admitted to the psychiatric evaluation that he’d undergone before his relocation.

  “Far as I can see, you’re a goddamned hero, not a liability.” A Vietnam vet himself, Dennis had been adamant—as well as loud enough that Jay had wished for earplugs. “Besides that, you’re R.C.’s nephew, and that’s good enough for me.”

  As far as Jay knew, Dennis had kept the knowledge of his recent history to himself, bragging of the “decorated veteran” part to others. To his way of thinking, the lives Jay had saved in an earlier incident, while stationed in Fallujah, absolved him of the possibility of guilt.

  “I got a call this morning, Dennis,” Jay said, “from the FBI, about Haz-Vestment.”

  “What?”

  Jay realized he had unconsciously lowered his voice. For good reason, too. Estelle Hooks was working late this evening, and she was known to alleviate the boredom of tax-statement preparation by eavesdropping on his conversations.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Jay promised. “You still coming by the house tonight?”

  More than anyone else, Dennis had thrown himself into the job of remodeling the late sheriff’s fire-damaged adobe house. Both Abe and Wallace Hooks insisted that, being a Riggins, Dennis came for the free beer Jay provided, but Jay suspected it was the man’s way of dealing with the death of an old friend, since he and Uncle R.C. had long been buddies. Drinking buddies, anyway, since the only thing Jay could remember the two doing together was sitting out on Uncle R.C.’s back steps and throwing back some cool ones at the end of a long day. While Jay, who had come to live with his bachelor relation at the age of twelve, attempted to do homework, Dennis—his hearing already fading—would boom out schemes to solve the county’s problems, most of which involved running the Hooks clan out of town. Uncle R.C. would smile and puff one of his cigars, pausing every so often to speak of things he might have done if he had left the county, or to wave away a cloud of smelly smoke.

  Jay smiled to recall it, though he’d been damned unhappy in those days after a single-car wreck killed his mother, and his father left abruptly to work on an offshore oil rig. As his father’s calls and visits dwindled down to nothing, Jay had given Uncle R.C. nine kinds of hell, something that now shamed him as much as his failure to come back for so much as a visit after escaping Devil’s Claw. Though his uncle had been the one to recommend that he “hit the ground runnin’ and never look back,” Jay regretted that he’d missed the chance to tell the man he was sorry for his behavior, or to thank R.C. for holding his rebellion in check with a firm but fair hand. God knew it was more than his old man—who had died five years back—had cared to do.

  “I’ll be there,” Dennis told him. “But I wanted to let you know I called Haz-Vestment’s office, and the fella there assured me work’s gonna start on schedule.”

  I’ll just bet he did, Jay thought miserably—and hoped the special agent nailed the conniving bastards to the wall.

  After excusing himself for a quick c
leanup in the men’s room, Jay headed for the Webb place to find out who was there. Best-case scenario would be Angie: by herself and in one piece, though mad as hell that he had padlocked the house’s doors to secure her belongings. But there were other possibilities as well, visitors who would make short work of his security measure, the drug dealers and coyotes who occasionally used such isolated places as safe houses while smuggling dope or illegals out of Mexico.

  Still, he hadn’t bothered calling Wallace, and he wouldn’t unless he saw something suspicious. With only the two of them in the department, backup was a luxury reserved for bigger things than long shots. He’d have to settle for the company of Max, who rode shotgun as the rough road jolted man and dog alike.

  In the rearview mirror, a choking plume of dust rose in the SUV’s wake. As he looked past the plastic hula dancer on the dashboard—a last vestige of his uncle’s aimless talk of retiring to Tahiti—Jay’s view was even less inviting. Tortilla-flat and hard-baked by a brutal sun, the Lost Lake area looked about as likely to support life as the surface of Mars. Jay tried to imagine what had prompted some misguided soul—Jonas Webb, according to local lore—to attempt to ranch along the salt flat’s edge decades earlier. Had to have been a freakishly wet season, one of those rare events that briefly veiled the desert’s harshness in soft green grasses. A joke played by the land to lure the unwitting into its grasp.

  But all too soon the lush grass would have withered, leaving only the thorny seedpods of the devil’s claw to catch the hooves of starving stock and the dungarees of the defeated. Had Webb cursed this place when he’d abandoned the adobe shelter he had built of earth and sweat and hope? Had he wept to leave the crosses that still stood sentry over the pair of nameless graves whose mounds still scarred the stony soil? More than once during his search for the missing woman, Jay had paused beside those two mounds, which someone had decorated with colored stones and desiccated petals, even a few iridescent feathers and a single, tiny skull bleached white save for the long orange incisors. Maybe a ground squirrel’s, he figured, and most likely Angie’s work. He wondered if the company of the dead had disturbed her or given comfort.

  Ahead he spotted the one-room dwelling she had claimed, an adobe with splotched, cracked walls painted gold by the late sunlight. Still some fifty yards distant, the house hunkered low and mean, a brick-shaped blot against the blue smudge of the distant foothills. Though a succession of squatters had attempted to improve it over the years, the covered front porch had collapsed on one end, and shutters dangled beside glassless windows. The peeling wooden screen door hung askew, as if in testimony to the pointlessness of his attempts to secure the place.

  Angie’s ancient Buick crouched beside the building, decaying just as quickly. Since Jay had last stopped by, a third dry-rotted tire had gone flat, giving the rusty brown sedan a drunken tilt. But his attention focused on the unfamiliar Ford that Dennis had reported.

  As Jay shifted the Suburban into park behind the vehicle, the hula dancer wriggled plastic hips. Staring past her, Max plunked his paws against the dashboard and raised his hackles with a growl.

  “What’s the matter, boy?” Jay asked. In the two weeks since he’d found the dog, hungry and abandoned at a roadside rest stop, Max had shown no signs of aggression other than his ill-advised lunge toward the snake. But clearly something was troubling him now, something Jay could neither see nor hear.

  Something that stirred the uneasiness he had been carrying inside him these past four months.

  His gun hand quaked as wraithlike figures took form in the shimmer of heat that rose from every solid surface.

  “Ali Baba, Ali Baba!” Baghdad’s children cried out, using the generic term for bad guys as they gestured toward the house.

  Jay looked in the direction their skinny fingers pointed, only to spot a sniper squatting with an AK-47 on the rooftop, his robe as black as his turban. A second terrorist peered out from the doorway, a Molotov cocktail in his hand.

  With a strangled shout Jay ducked low, his heart pounding and his eyes stinging with sweat. Distracted from whatever had captured his attention outside, Max gave himself over to this new game, his tail wagging and his tongue licking at his master’s face.

  “Shit.” Jay fended off the kisses and blinked hard, struggling to regain the when and where of his position. Once it came to him, he peered over the dash and forced himself to focus.

  The house, though homely, was certainly West Texan, a crumbling adobe in a familiar land. The only Ali Baba had sprung from his damned imagination.

  Screwing his eyes shut, Jay sat before the chill gale of the AC vents and cursed himself. He could have applied for work anywhere in the country, someplace with soft, green mountains or towering pine forests. The seaside might have been nice, or somewhere with a lake. Instead he’d dragged his sorry ass back to the one place whose sprawling expanses and limitless horizons kept him tied to that other desert, the desert that had swallowed up his foolish promises to bring all his men home safely.

  When he looked again, he saw a woman in the shadows of the porch’s standing section. For a bare instant terror clothed her in a dark abaya, but Jay willed himself to stillness until the illusion bled away.

  In its wake stood not Angie, as he’d hoped, but Dana Vanover, dressed in rumpled khaki shorts and a somewhat grimy pale green T-shirt. She held a broom in one hand, and her blond bangs had fallen limply across her eyes.

  Had she heard him, seen him spook at nothing? Maybe not, for she smiled and raised a bottle of water toward him in a casual greeting, not in the least alarmed.

  Thank God for that, at least…but still, she shouldn’t be here.

  Frowning, Jay shut off his engine and climbed out into what felt like a solid wall of heat. Max burst past him, his whole body wagging in his rush to greet her, though he was usually cautious around those he didn’t know well. His caution made a lot of sense, considering that Jay had found pockmarks on the dog’s side where some mean bastard had used the stray for target practice with a pellet gun.

  “Hey, there, boy.” Dana shifted her bottle and reached down to rub the dog’s ears. “How’re you doing, Max boy?”

  Jay stood a moment, troubled by the way pleasure punched through his irritation. So she had a pretty smile and the kind of body that did a clingy little T-shirt proud. He had no business being glad to see her—and no sense for thinking of the things they’d done in those damned dreams that did an end run around his self-control each night. Her presence only complicated an already tense situation. Once the news about Haz-Vestment got out, there were going to be some seriously unhappy folks in Rimrock County. Folks who might not think so clearly in their rush to assign blame.

  “You found this place,” he said as he moved nearer. “And you’re walking on that leg.”

  “I can certainly see why they hired you as sheriff. You’re an observant fellow, aren’t you?”

  “That’s not the half of it. I noticed that it’s hot, too, you’ve been cleaning, and you showed up in a different vehicle.”

  He nodded toward the far side of the house, in the direction of a gas generator’s hum. “With some serious supplies. Which means you plan on staying awhile and not just picking up your sister’s belongings and scooting home, like anybody with a lick of sense would.”

  Grin stretching, she said, “God, you are good. I had to rent the SUV in Pecos. The convertible was too small, and I thought I’d need the higher clearance to get back here.”

  “So who gave you directions?” He was surprised he hadn’t heard about it.

  “It was, uh, Bill Navarro—you remember, flower guy, snake charmer.” She wrinkled her nose as she said it. “I still had his card, so I called to ask him—and of course to say thanks for the arrangement.”

  Jay resisted the temptation to fill her in about the rumors regarding Russian brides and Bill’s history of fighting, not to mention the stories of a painkiller addiction in his past after he had injured his back in some mishap
with a steer. For one thing, Bill was always on his best behavior with women. For another, Dana had too much class to string the man along.

  “So how’d you get in, anyway?” Jay asked. “Did you pry off my padlocks?”

  “That wood’s so far gone, all I had to do was pull a little and it crumbled. And it’s not as if anybody couldn’t crawl in through those windows. But listen, I’ve got some more water inside. Want some while we talk?”

  He shook his head, since he’d just finished a bottle. Even so, he squeezed past her into the leaning porch’s shade, eager to avoid the searing sun.

  Dana excused herself and ducked inside. In under a minute she returned with a small plastic tub of water, which she put down for Max to drink. After giving him a pat, she said, “Nice dog. A little skinny…”

  “We’re working on that,” Jay said. “I found him only a couple of weeks back. Or he found me—jumped inside my RV when I got out at a rest stop. I thought I’d take him to a shelter, but…” He shrugged his shoulders. “He makes for decent company.”

  “A stray, huh?” she asked before giving him a more professional appraisal. To the dog she said, “Looks like you’ve had a rough go of it, poor guy. But I don’t see anything a little TLC won’t cure.”

  Afterward she sat on one end of a rough-hewn bench as Jay took the side opposite. It was still damned hot here, but she’d run an extension cord to an oscillating fan she’d set up, and its dry breeze offered at least the suggestion of comfort.

  The blond tips of her hair stirred as she looked straight at him. “I told you I’d be back, just like I told you I was staying till I find her. I’m starting off by going over this house inch by inch.”

  He shook his head. “This is no place for you. All the sweeping in the world won’t fix that, and neither will that generator.”

  Her lips pursed before she answered. “My sister managed with a lot less, and she lived here for, what, five months?”